Hatch
by GreenNebulae
Summary: "So Sheldon, what came first: the chicken or the egg?"


This is for the prompt Hatch

 **Start**

Penny is up ridiculously early. She glances at the clock again and shakes her head. She shouldn't be up for hours. She yawns as she makes her way to the bathroom. Leonard and the gang are all gone for some event Sheldon skipped because it was 'beneath' him and Penny skipped because she wouldn't be caught there if she were dead. When she gets back from the bathroom she realizes she won't be getting any more sleep so breakfast it is!

Except that her milk is certainly bad.

She throws it away before staring at the contents of her fridge with a frown.

Hey!

Moonpie should be eating now, shouldn't he?

She grabs a pair of shorts before heading over to her neighbor's. She uses her key and walks in as Sheldon closes the fridge door and places a few items on the counter. He meets her eyes and opens his mouth, likely to scold her, when she smiles and skips over to him.

"So what's for breakfast today?"

"Eggs, toast, jam." He answers instead of scolding.

"I'll join you," Sheldon nods, he is used to eating with someone, and if leonard is gone, penny may as well take his place. That will also help his shopping schedule stay on track, because having two extra eggs throws everything off! She moves over to the egg carton. "I can help."

"No." Penny shrugs her shoulder and hovers over him as he washes his hands and cracks an egg on the skillet. He repeats the process, and the silence continues. Does he really have to wash his hands after every egg? She bites her lip as the silence gets loud and taps the table before asking.

"So, Sheldon, what came first: the chicken or the egg?"

"The chicken, obviously." He cracks the fourth egg without a mess and throws the shell in the trash. He moves back to the sink. The first round of toast is done and they both ignore the toaster as it pops the toast out.

"Hey, come on now, that's supposed to be an unanswerable question!" Sheldon turns his eyes from the pan to her as if she's the one making things up.

"Nuh uh, you can't know that!"

"Penny, I am a-"

"Physicist, I know," she ignores the glare he gives her for interrupting him. "Still, there's no answer, right? Because the chicken lays the egg which the chicken pops out of, and then that chicken lays an egg for another chicken," Penny trails off as she sees Sheldon working out how to make her understand. He moves the toast to a plate and deposits two more slices into the toaster.

"Tell me Penny, what came first, woman, or man?" Is what he settles on as returns the eggs to the fridge.

"Well," she grins, "you'd hope the girl did." She looks to the eggs in the pan as Sheldon begins to flip them. "But in my experience it's usually the guy."

"Penny," he sighs and she huffs. "Sexual reference aside, though that may be difficult for you to accomplish-"

"Woman." Sheldon freezes with his mouth open and Penny grimaces. "Sorry." She quickly apologizes. "It's just, everyone is born, right? So you can't be born without a woman, so she had to be first. And now they are saying women don't even need men for babies anymore, so we had to be first."

"Who impregnated her?"

"What?" She asks, not because she hadn't heard the question or didn't know what impregnated meant, but because she hadn't thought of that.

"Who's sperm?" And Penny has no answer. There has to be a man for there to be a baby, but that man needed to have been born, but then who's the father?

"I don't know." Penny grabs the plates for Sheldon to deposit the eggs on but is looking away.

"Everybody has parents, so who's first?" She feels like her mind is being blown right now.

"Evolution is much more fluid than to suddenly introduce a species. It's through thousands and millions of years that changes come to pass for an animal. Simply put, the change is so gradual; it's only noticeable in the long run."

"I heard that if you put a frog in boiling water it'll jump out, but if you slowly heat it up the frog will stay until it dies." Penny smiles as she walks to the table to put the plates down. Sheldon shuts off the burner and grabs their cups. He cannot prove or disprove what she's said, so he doesn't comment on it, but it is an interesting piece of information.

"In the case of chickens, they descended from some other animal similar to them. In a series of fortunate events, a significant number of them did something wrong. The genome-"

"Whoa! KISS, remember?" Penny holds her hand up in surrender. "Keep it stupid simple." Sheldon sighs, but memories of trying to teach Penny a 'little' physics has him keeping it simple.

"There is a copying that goes on in sexual reproduction," and Penny can tell Sheldon wants to elaborate so much further, "and it's not perfect. The errors can lead to changes that don't mean anything, mean something unfavorable, or something favorable." Penny gets that. It's like that time she copied from the girl in front of her during history and didn't make the answers match up 100 %. She even made sure to get one or two wrong each time.

"Species P laid eggs, and the eggs contained some formation that altered the growing of the offspring. When it comes time to hatch, we have a chicken." She knows Sheldon said the changes are gradual but she just imagines a bunch of chickens hatching from big dog like creatures.

"So when the chicken pop out, they are with the P guys, and then they all gradually become chickens?" Sheldon nods, "so that's like people now dating Neanderthals?"

"Yes, it would be a modern day person dating a Neanderthal."

"I've dated a few of those," she grimaces before pausing to watch Sheldon eat.

"Sheldon," he shifts his focus to her from the food. "Is that why you're not interested in relationships and sex, you're waiting for another homo nervi or something?"

"Homo Novus." The corner of his lip rises before he goes back to his food.

"What if you never find her? You know, with evolution being slow and all that."

"I would need to make sure my genes made it to the next generation, so I suppose I will find someone very suited for survival and procreation in ways that I am not."

"Not similar to you? Don't you want super babies?"

"No. It is survival of the most adaptable out here Penny, and diversity is key in surviving."

"Surviving what?"

"Anything. Everything."

"Like earthquakes and floods and outer space?"

"It's survival of the fittest." He reaches for the remote to turn on the TV and she leans back against the couch. Some scientist or another probably said that, but it doesn't matter, because Sheldon implied he would have sex sometime in the future, and wow, doesn't that feel like the discovery of the century?

 **End**

GN: Thoughts?


End file.
